![]() ![]() Linda McCartney was an anchor after the madness of The Beatles and she looms benignly over almost everything he wrote during their time together. Lyrics for Queenie Eye - Live At Tokyo Dome by Paul McCartney There were rules you never told me Never came up with a plan All the stories that you sold me Didnt help me understand But I had to get it worked out Had nobody who could help So then in the end it turned out That I had to do it By myself. As a Beatle but still an unworldly Liverpudlian, he lived with his sophisticated girlfriend Jane Asher and her parents in London’s elegant Wimpole Street (helpfully, they moved a piano into his room). ![]() ![]() His mother and recurring muse Mary died when he was 14 and “it was something I never got over”. Women dominate McCartney’s personal and professional lives. Or, in the “Love Me Do” piece, to walk us in forensic detail from the street, “past my dad’s lavender hedge” to the dining room of the McCartney home, where he and Lennon wrote many of their early songs. Instead, his non-muso, poet’s eye gives McCartney licence to suggest with uncharacteristic self-examination “I know about delving into your mind to look for solace in a song”. Muldoon avoids falling into the trap of merely describing how a song was written. The result, as McCartney surely intended, is autobiography by delightfully disjointed default. Instead of adulation or muck-raking, McCartney took a different course, plumping for Paul Muldoon, the Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of poetry, and gave 50 hours of his time, over five years. He notes too that Yoko’s studio presence during the recording of “Let It Be” was “challenging” and he alludes to Lennon’s heroin habit during the twilight of The Beatles. Inevitably his version of their post-Beatles relationship is the sweet one where, in an international version of a Liverpool garden fence, whenever he was in New York, he’d pop round to the Ono-Lennons for a coffee.Īlong this long and winding road, old hurts still simmer, though and he does admit thinking “oh f**k off you fucking idiot” when the pair were trading barbs in the early 70s. In selecting his collaborator, he avoided both hardcore Beatles fans who could bore for Liverpool and anyone seeking to unearth new information on “some supposed feud between John and Yoko and me”. It’s beautifully presented with photographs, original lyric sheets and such ephemera as McCartney’s diary entry for the Abbey Road cover shoot, which he accompanied with sketches of the foursome.Īs ever when he has full control, McCartney has been canny. It does very well indeed.īeautifully presented over two weighty volumes, The Lyrics is McCartney discussing 154 of his songs, from 1956’s “I Lost My Little Girl” to the present day, arranged in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He’ll be 80 next year and since it’s hard to conceive of anyone bar The Queen whose day- to-day life since the early 60s has been chronicled quite so extensively, a formal autobiography is unlikely to emerge. ![]() There has never been a book about a great musician like it.At almost any point after The Beatles split, it must have been tempting for Paul McCartney to set the record straight. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney's personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs' lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. The one thing I've always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. 'More often than I can count, I've been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right.
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